Why job agencies prefer foreign workers

After 15 years in recruitment, Alison Andrews, who runs an agency for temporary staff in Somerset, has some strong views on UK workers.

“I don’t take the British applications very seriously, to be honest,” she said. “Before I recruited foreign workers I only used to recruit English people. Then, people used to tell me so many lies, all the time, about why they didn’t want to go to work. Every day at 6am my phone would be ringing with company bosses screaming at me because no staff were there.

“I’d knock on people’s doors and they’d say, ‘Oh, my gran died in Liverpool’, or ‘My goldfish is dead’, ‘I’ve got a headache’. Every excuse you could possibly hear.”